108 look some unpublicized courses that have many first-rate holes and an over-all soundness and charm but have not been selected for major champion- ships because they lack sufficient length to test the big boys. In En- gland, he has in mind such courses as Sunningdale, Ganton, and Woodhall Spa. When he talks of courses in this country he loves to play, he invariably mentions, along with Seminole and Cypress Point, which he thinks are marvellous, Prairie Dunes (far off the beaten path, in Hutchinson, Kansas); the National Golf Links and its neighbor, Shinnecock Hills; Chicago Golf (as the insiders call it); and two courses in New Jersey, Somerset Hills and Ridgewood, that were designed by the inventive A. W. Tillinghast. Three or four years after becoming a professional golfer, Crenshaw, with- out expressly thinking about it, came to realize that when his playing days were over he would like to be a golf- course architect. No other kind of work interested him half as much. Furthermore, he thought he would be good at it. In the fall of 1984, he altered that decision. With many new courses being built left and right on beautiful new sites, he felt that if he waited another six or seven years be- fore he entered golf-course architec- ture a change might have set in, and there might be very few new courses in interesting locations left to build. Be- sides, he would have to compete with a fairly large number of experienced firms for the available jobs. He was in this frame of mind last September when he was asked by Jay Morrish, an able architect, if he would like to work with him and Byron N-elson on a new course at Las Colinas Country Club, which they were starting to design on a tract of undulating land east of the Dallas- F ort Worth airport. Crenshaw replied that nothing would please him more. Since then, he has spent much time working on the course. It is scheduled to be completed this fall, and in the spring of 1986 it will serve as the new site of the annual Byron Nel- son Classic. "In the future, I expect to spend as much time playing tournaments as I have in the past," Crenshaw told me. "I've always made it a practice to set aside a fair amount of free time from the tournament circuit. That time, and maybe more, will go into building courses. It won't be a glamorous life. To get a hole just right, an architect must spend a lot of time at the site. I don't think you can build a fascinating green, for example, by relaying in- structions to a bulldozer operator. You've got to be there during the long stretches when the crew is moving the soil for the green into place with scoops and, following that, when you mold the rolls and breaks of each green practically by hand until you've got them right." He paused a moment in thought. "A good golf architect, as I see it, must have done a great deal of research at many courses and tested that research himself. Then when he lays out a course he will know how to move the earth that has to be moved so that it resembles natural golf land. He must stay with a course until he's pretty sure that he's got a course on which every hole is elastic enough so that it is playable for all the different classes of players, from beginners to the best professionals. On a really good course, the contours should be gentle and have a nice ease of move- ment. There must be a pleasant diver- sity in the shots that the golfers of all degrees of skill have to play- some from uphill stances, some from downhill stances, some from sidehill stances. You've constantly got to stim- ulate both the average golfers and the best golfers. I'm fully in accord, for example, with Alister MacKenzie's principle that a course should encour- age the average golfer to attempt a shot he hasn't tried before. That will make him a better golfer. I think we must test the abilities of the top golfers more thoroughly by designing stronger par 5s. To cite one example, in this long-driving world there's been a tendency to build too many par-4 holes. We're not listening to the land. Golf at its best is more than a game in which you fly the ball from point to point. I think that a golf architect must come up with holes that offer a wide variety of shots. I like to see holes that are designed so that the 1 [R?ftø 1ì? JUNE 10, 1985 golfer must make the ball move a cer- tain way-say, make him bound it onto the green. I like to see the ball roll on a pitch-and-run shot. I like to see the ball curl on the green. We don't see enough of those things now. " It is good to hear that Crenshaw has added another string to hIS bow. I think that he will be a remarkably good golf-course architect-that he will build courses that are sound, orig- inal, and a great pleasure to play. ^ T the Augusta National on the eve .n. of the Masters, when the mem- bers, the players, the media people, and the patrons (which is the Augusta Na- tional's term for the spectators) ex- change views on which golfers they think might win the tournament, the defending champion usually figures large in their conversations. If a man was able to win the year before, he is obviously a superior player, and there is no reason he shouldn't be in the race again the next April. It was different at Augusta this year. Crenshaw's rec- ord in 1984 after winning the Masters was extremely disappointing. He failed to make the thirty-six- hole cut in both the U.S. Open and the P.G.A. Cham- pionship. He played quite well in the British Open, but when he finished his second round with three straight bo- geys he was out of contention. It was a terribly hard year for him. His many friends hoped that he would soon re- gain his winning form, but in 1985 his game had been even sorrier: prior to the Masters, he had made the thirty- six-hole cut in only three of the nine tournaments he entered. It was the old story of the youthful sensation who becomes a standout at an indecently early age because he plays the game by feel. Somehow or other, he later loses that feel, and he must then learn how to consciously make the moves on which his natural swing was based. In a somewhat similar case in the late nineteen-fifties, Gene Littler, who had been one of the leading players on the tour, lost his swing, just like that. As a boy in San Diego, he had learned to play golf the way most young fellows learn to play baseball or basketball: he imitated the swings of the best players he saw, and worked to get better. When he hit his slump, he had to go through the harrowing process of breaking down the movements that made up his swing, and then, with the help of friends in golf-particularly Paul Runyan-memorizing these movements and putting them together.